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God’s discipline isn’t a topic we like talking about or facing in any way. It feels intimidating and leaves us wondering if God is angry at us. But Proverbs gives us a different story.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
If you’ve been following along here on Sunday nights, or if you’ve been a part of Little Hills in some way over the last few years, you know that we’ve put a lot of effort into having a garden as people come into the church. We’re in a rather asphalty area; there’s just a bunch of parking lot and concrete, but there’s a little planter and we’ve enjoyed it for years as a way to make the church seem a little more welcoming for those coming in person.
For the first few years, it had mostly what people would probably call weeds but sometimes had really pretty flowers. Then we started to actually be intentional about it. We’d plant those and add in some cosmos and some daylilies, and they’d bloom and they’d look beautiful. It was just really nice. And then last year hit. We had a late frost, and the little seedlings that would reseed themselves every year from the cosmos had started to sprout up and then were hit by the frost. So we lost the first batch, but some more started to sprout up. Then it rained really hard and it seemed to wash those out. We planted some seeds and they started to sprout up, and then some workers dumped a saltwater aquarium— a very large one— worth of water on the garden, killing all of them.
It took months and some new topsoil and a lot of teamwork in the church and a lot of watering, but we finally got some cosmos growing last year. It wasn’t a big flourishing of flowers or anything like that, but it was a nice batch of flowers and it looked beautiful. We looked forward to this year when we’d get a fresh start. Well, the fresh start should have come this year, but the seedlings started to come up and they died off and were gone. We planted more seeds, more cosmos, and they were gone. I started to wonder, well, did the salt somehow leach back up towards the surface and it’s killing the seedlings even though we’d eliminated that first initial dose? It didn’t seem likely, but we weren’t really sure what was wrong.
Maybe we need to plant something that’s already established, so I ordered some marigolds and we planted those in the ground. We had a water brigade, and I know when Jerry and Jamie had been there, they’ve been really into watering the garden, rushing out as soon as they get there and trying to water it. It seemed like we’d be on the right track. But a week after we planted the marigolds, they were gone, mostly gone at least, and they hadn’t shriveled up like you’d expect from salt. No, they were just missing large parts of themselves because something— can’t see what— but something is eating them. That seemed to confirm what was going on this year. It wasn’t that the salt had somehow leached back up; it was that something enjoys fresh tender greens and sees our garden as a salad bar.
Now, then the question has come up, well, should we keep doing this? Probably all of us have wondered that at some point. Is this worth all the effort? Whenever we run into roadblocks, if we’re trying to be thoughtful, we’ll naturally come to that question. Hi, welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad that you’re here tonight because all of us have faced challenges like that— places where we wonder, why is this bad thing happening? We wonder, should I keep going? Should I give up? You probably know someone also who’s gone through tough things. Maybe you could click that share button right now and that like button so someone else can hear about this message, because we’re going to talk about that tonight.
What do we do? How do we make sense of those bad times we hit, especially when we’re not sure why they’re happening? We didn’t know why the garden was being seemingly eliminated every time it started growing, and it turned out to be a whole bunch of different causes. You start to wonder, well, maybe I shouldn’t do this. Maybe you’re wondering that tonight about God. Should you keep following him? Because you try, and every time you try to get going, every time you start a Bible reading, every time you go to church, every time you get into a Bible study, something bad happens, and you think, does God hate me? Should I cut my losses and give up now? Maybe that’s the best thing to do because it just keeps going wrong.
How do we make sense of that? Well, God’s not surprised by any of this. We talked last week about, earlier in Proverbs, the last few verses leading up to tonight’s passage, which is starting at verse 11, that God isn’t a blessing vending machine, right? He doesn’t… we don’t just do enough good things and he outputs something. But then how do we make sense of what we actually do face? Let’s pray that God would help us to understand, especially those bad times, because that’s the time… those are the times that we really struggle, and that we could better understand Him and His care for us through that. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, we do pray that you’d be with us tonight, that you would help us to see what you want us to see in your word, that you’d apply it to our hearts, that we would be enabled to grow closer to you, that we would grow more into the men and women that you want us to be. Lord, would you comfort us with your love when we’re not sure how to make sense of something, when the gardens of our lives keep disappearing and we’re not sure why? Would you help us to trust you in those times? We pray in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
Let’s go ahead. Let’s jump into verse 11. It says, “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline, or be weary of his reproof.” Now, immediately, all of our hackles are going to start going up, because what do you mean discipline? Are you going to say that whatever hard thing I’m going through, I brought it on myself? Well, sometimes we do, right? Sometimes we actually do bring hard things on ourselves, and we all have had those times where we’ve just unequivocally done that. We did something stupid or something outright wrong, and bad things happened, and we know where it came from. Everybody knows where it came from. There’s no question. It’s just nice and simple.
But what God wants us to understand is those hard times that we can’t just go point A to point B and explain like that are also times that He’s working to discipline or to grow us. And as we’re going to see tonight as we explore this, the word discipline can be a bit challenging here because as we think about it, we know human discipline, and human discipline has a lot of flaws. And so when we hear the word discipline, we wonder, does God really care? Is this really meant for my good?
Another problem that we should head off right at the beginning, though, and I want to talk about this first, is the idea, if God’s growing us through all these difficult things, does that mean we should affirm that hard things should happen? And when people bring hard times to us, should we inevitably and always say, isn’t that great the person did that? Because look at this growth opportunity. Should we do that?
One of my very favorite verses in all of scripture, but one that’s also misused, is Genesis 50:20, where Joseph looks at his brothers towards the end of his life and says, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good, for the salvation of many.” Sometimes people will say, well, if God’s discipline is in everything that’s hard, then maybe Joseph’s brothers were actually good. They did the thing that needed to be done. Joseph ended up in Egypt. Lots of people were saved. Therefore, and sometimes even the people that have caused hard times to us will bring this up, this hard time that you’re experiencing, maybe that I’ve caused you to experience, is actually a good thing because you’re going to save a lot of people through it.
Let’s be clear, Joseph does not excuse what his brothers have done, and nowhere else in Scripture is it excused. What they did was wrong. Was Joseph partially responsible? Well, he contributed to it, right? As a young man, he was bragging about the dreams of his future importance to his brothers and his parents, and he created a lot of resentment. And I really don’t have to say it to make the point that it’s never right to sell your sibling into slavery. It’s always wrong. It’s never right to throw your sibling into a pit, even. It’s always wrong. These are bad things to do. And Joseph’s brothers, they were bad for doing it, even if ultimately God used it for good.
The point being, yes, it was used for Joseph’s discipline. Joseph went from an arrogant young man who liked to brag to a man of great maturity and restraint and wisdom, whom God used powerfully to testify to Himself, to the Egyptians, and to the rest of the world, and to save a lot of people, including those very siblings who sold him into slavery. God did that. And God equipped Joseph through his hardships so that he was ready for that. He wasn’t ready when he was an arrogant young man to do that.
But that doesn’t mean we have to say that what Joseph’s brothers did was right, only that God used it. And that’s where we’re going to dwell tonight. We’re not getting into whether everything that’s happened to you that’s bad is actually something that should be affirmed as being good to have happened or be caused to have happened by somebody. It’s quite possible some of the worst things that any of us are going to experience, the other person was sinning in doing it, even as God may have used that to grow us in some way.
And because we’re all human and we’re in a fallen world, there are very few times where it’s just nice and clean and black and white. The person receiving the difficult time was purely getting correction for his or her own benefit. And the person who ended up causing that disciplinary time to happen was purely doing it for the good of the other. It’s very, very rare. We don’t have to excuse it to say, but God works in hard times, and that’s where this is.
Joseph, you see, could have become really even more arrogant, even more angry, not trust in the Lord, and not been ready when he finally did get to the point he was supposed to be to use the hard lessons he’d learned to God’s glory and to the benefit of everyone, himself included. He got to be the man he was meant to be, but instead he trusted God in that, right? And when we see that in the span of his life, he can see how God works. It’s one of the reasons why when he has the opportunity, he doesn’t say, brothers, you did the right thing. I’m so glad you threw me into a pit. But he also doesn’t see the need to get retribution against them because he sees the big picture. And at this point, he’s just thankful to see what God has done.
Are there times that someone needs to be reported or turned in or what have you? Yes. We’re not getting into that tonight. What we’re looking at is the Joseph side of it, the side that all of us experience, and that’s the side that this proverb is talking about. And the real question is, are we, when God is taking those difficult times, are we ready to receive them and grow in them or are we loathe to? Do we hate them? That’s one of the translations we could use of God’s discipline here. But God uses them to grow us.
It sounds so much easier to just turn away from God. It sounds so much easier. And this is why people like what gets preached that I referred to last week, even when it kind of turns us the wrong way when we hear all this about give enough money and God will bless you. Why do we like that? Because of that vending machine nature. If you go down the street from the church to a soda machine and you put in $2 and you press the button for a Coca-Cola and nothing comes out, you can look at the machine and say, oh, wow, yeah, soda’s now $2.25 to get out of the machine. I need to put in another quarter. And you put in the quarter and clunk and out comes soda. And you can grumble the whole time that soda costs way too much from a soda machine now. And it does. And you can remember back when it was way less. But you know exactly what you need to do to get the soda out at least.
And there’s that appeal to the blessing vending machine mindset. It’s wrong, but there’s an appeal. If I just know what I need to put in, how many quarters to insert, how many righteous deeds to insert, I’ll know what to do. And if I know that if something bad happens, it’s always because I’m doing the exact wrong thing, and I just turn around and put a different righteous quarter in and God will give blessing to me instead, that’s so easy. But it’s not how this life works. God’s very clear on that. He doesn’t promise a blessing vending machine. He calls us to grow in whatever circumstance we’re in because he’s with us in it.
This is the very main theme passage of this whole chapter of Proverbs. Trust in the Lord with all of your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. We’ve been talking about that. And here it is again. There’s a reason why that comes first and why we need to understand that for all the things that God is calling us to do in a wise life. Because if we’re trying to lean on our own understanding, it just isn’t going to work. If we’re looking for that blessing vending machine, it just isn’t going to work.
But if we trust, even when it’s hard, God uses that to grow us, not just to save us, right? Salvation comes simply through trusting in Him. But then when we continue in that trust, he uses that to actually allow us to flourish. Joseph flourishes. A lot of wrong done to him. A lot of sin that we outright should condemn. But God uses it.
Imagine this summer. We’re surprising; I can’t believe we’re already here. Here we are, the first of June, and it’s summer all ahead of us, and you say, I’m going to go explore the great outdoors. And you go out to a beautiful Missouri park. Here we have karst topography, so there’s all these caves, and you start kind of nosing around. You don’t have any experience going into caves. You don’t really even know how to make sure you don’t get lost, but it’s right off the path, no problem. You stick your head in, and all of a sudden you see something rushing out at you. You feel a sharp pain, and you look down, and there’s this angry fox staring at you. You realize this fox had taken shelter in the cave. You think maybe you see a little frothing under his mouth. And you look down at your hand that you just felt that sharp pain in, and you think, uh-oh. I think I know what just happened. I think that fox might be rabid.
And then you say, well, maybe that’s just white fur under his mouth, and maybe you’re right because sometimes things are rabid even without the foaming. And now you have to decide what you’re going to do. Are you going to talk yourself into that it really wasn’t a rabid fox that bit you, that maybe your skin really wasn’t punctured, that it’s really okay because you have a busy week ahead? Or are you going to immediately leave and go to an urgent care or a hospital and start getting a whole series of shots for rabies?
I don’t like shots, period, and I don’t like shots that make me feel poorly, and I understand maybe the current rabies shots are a little less painful, but they’re still shots, and you’re going to feel bad afterwards. You say, but I have so much to do. I don’t think he really punctured my skin. I’m just going to go about my day. And you feel okay that day, and you feel okay that week, and you feel okay two weeks later, and you say, this was so much better than taking all these shots. I chose the right thing. But three weeks later or a year later, you start to show symptoms.
And here’s the thing that I can say, because virtually speaking, everyone who contracts rabies and becomes symptomatic will die. It’s virtually 100%. Once you realize that you made a mistake and you should have gotten the shot, it’s too late. Sure seemed easier in the moment, but it’s not easier when you know you’re going to die and there’s nothing that can be done about it. You want to die in the hospital, you want to die at home, but you’re going to die. Then suddenly those shots don’t sound so bad. That’s how God’s discipline is. It sounds painful in the moment, and it sounds like there’s got to be an easier way to life than this, a life that doesn’t include suffering, and you just tell me that God loves me in the suffering. It sounds so much easier. There’s got to be an easier way than getting all these shots. I can just go about my week. I feel fine.
But if you knew you were going to die in three weeks or a month or two months or a year, we’d all probably agree, you know, the shots would make a lot more sense, because virtually 100% of the people, it’s the most incredible vaccine we have by most accounts. If you get that shot, you aren’t going to die of rabies as long as you get it before you have symptoms. That’s a pretty good guarantee in the medical world, about as good as you’ll ever encounter. It’s going to be painful and unpleasant, and you’re going to feel miserable, but you’re going to live.
God’s discipline is a lot like that. It can be painful and unpleasant, but as you’re going through those shots, what’s the doctor going to say to you? Just trust me. This is so much better than the alternative. It doesn’t seem like it right now, but it really will be.
What God’s saying here is, trust me. I’m giving you the course of vaccines you need to remove the menagerie of animal bites that you receive from sin animals. You have so many different bacteria and viruses coursing through your blood, ready to kill you, and I’m administering something to not only save you, ultimately, which God does when we trust in Him. It’s not, we’re getting to being saved. We are saved. But I’m actually going to make it so you can actually live life doing what you were meant to do. I’m going to prepare you for things.
He was preparing Joseph, but he’s also preparing you and me, and it isn’t always fun. It isn’t fun. But if we knew that God was curing and helping us to recover from a 100% fatal disease, doesn’t that change our perspective when we don’t get the blessing vending machine type promise? Because here’s the thing that we do know.
Verse 12: God intends his discipline for our good. “For the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” God gives discipline for our good. And I alluded to this earlier. We almost should come up with a different word for God’s discipline. His providential discipline, maybe we could call it provident or something. I don’t know. But it’s not the same as what we know as discipline, right? We sometimes have maybe given discipline to someone, or we’ve received it, and you know what? We know from both angles it’s not always perfect and just purely giving and righteous, right? Sometimes we want to discipline someone because we’re angry or we want to make our point. We want to show how we are right. And sometimes we see discipline coming at us and we realize it’s not being administered for our good; it’s being administered for vengeance or self-righteousness. We can see that too.
And so we see those angles and we say, discipline, that just sets me wrong. This is wrong. But what God’s saying is, this is something that has a 100% cure rate because I’m giving it to you purely. There’s no contamination in it. I don’t have mixed motives. I am righteous. I don’t have to be self-righteous and somehow try to pretend to be. I’m doing this because I love you.
It’s notable here as we look at verse 12: This is the only place in Proverbs God’s referred to as Father. We as Christians, we take calling God Father very naturally because Jesus spoke of God the Father as Father and said He was our Father that we could call on, right, the Lord’s prayer. So it seems natural to us, but it wasn’t as clear in Old Testament times. God hadn’t fully revealed Himself in that way yet. And yet here He does, because He wants to make it clear. You’re going to receive from me correction. I am going to discipline you. I’m going to, if you want a softer word, disciple you, and it’s going to be 100% for your good.
An earthly parent may mean it for the child’s good, and it may be sometimes and may not be sometimes. But our Heavenly Father, His discipline is always good, always for us. It’s always growing us. Sometimes it’s because we brought on our own problem 100%, those stupid, idiotic times that we know. We talked about that last night. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to be anything we did at all. We’re not even like Joseph somewhere in the middle. We’re just, we were just innocently going about something. But God may be growing us in a different area we can’t even see at the moment, that we don’t understand what He’s preparing us for.
And so the key thing on discipline is to always say, well, what was I doing in this exact moment that was wrong? But am I willing to trust God as my Heavenly Father in this moment? That’s the question. And for God, as He calls us to trust His discipline, He calls us to trust it knowing that there’s that love in it. We would never walk up to somebody and want them to know that we really care about them and love them and say, I love you so much, I want to discipline you. That sounds really, really strange, right?
But when God wanted to affirm His love for David and His eternal promise of a covenant kingdom, a house that would continue on forever, the promise that ultimately leads to the Messiah, what does God say to David? Well, it’s what the author of Hebrews also says applies to us. He’s going to quote what God says to David. We’ll look at the whole here in Hebrews 12.
Here’s what the author of Hebrews says: “Think of him who endured such opposition against himself by sinners, so that you may not grow weary in your souls and give up. You have not yet resisted to the point of bloodshed in your struggle against sin. And have you forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as sons? Here’s what God had said back in the Old Testament to David as part of His covenant promise: ‘My son, do not scorn the Lord’s discipline or give up when He corrects you. For the Lord disciplines the one He loves and chastises every son He accepts.’ Endure your suffering.” This is back to the author of Hebrews. “Endure your suffering as discipline. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there that a father does not discipline? But if you do not experience discipline, something all sons have shared in, then you are illegitimate and not sons.”
So two things here. One thing we can see, because that quote about David is in a giant celebration of God’s faithfulness and His care for David and His descendants. This promise of a dynasty that will reign forever, a dynasty that Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of. So it’s not in a bad context. It’s in a celebratory, loving context.
But the second thing we see by the fact that the author of Hebrews brings us back to it, and why I wanted us to look at it there and not in its original passage to David, is that it’s not just for David. It’s not just for a special few that God disciplines them out of love and he really, when bad things happen to you or to me, He just hates us. Rather, the author of Hebrews says all of us are going to go through this because we’re all sons of the Heavenly Father. In that same way, He’s adopted all of us. Sons and daughters.
And so when we face a hard time, when we face correction, whether it’s for things that we’ve actively done wrong or things that we really can’t understand in the moment, God’s calling us just as much to do exactly what this proverb says: to trust Him in His discipline. Not to despise it, but to realize in it that God’s actually saying, I love you. I’m there for you.
I mean, this is really— I don’t have to tell you this is hard, right? Because we know this is hard. And we know it’s hard when people correct us in this life because it’s always a mixed bag. Even when we mean well.
Back in seminary, all my compatriots knew that I was an English major in college because I loved to quote literature. When I’d preach a sermon, I’d have a literary illustration almost every time. Way more. I try not to force everyone into that every time now, but every time. You could count on it. And so everyone knew.
Of course, as an English major, people knew I had done a lot of writing. And so one of my friends came up to me. He’d been researching for months on this big paper about a Greek passage and put in all kinds of good work. He was really excited about it. And he wanted me as an English major to pour over it and to offer some editing advice on it so that he wouldn’t end up losing out on the grade he’d earned otherwise by having some writing issues. And I said, sure, I’ll do that.
And I was actually, admittedly, quite anxious to do it because I’d been an English major. I’d watched professors mark up all kinds of papers with red ink. I wanted to be one of those professors with the red ink. And someone was asking me to do it. And boy, was I going to do it.
And in fact, as I read through his paper, he had lots of fine research, but a lot of words and phrases that were awkward and some grammatical errors. And I just started going down the page with my pen and I was marking the red ink and leaving comments. Did you really mean this? Well, how about this? How about this? How about this word? And the pages were covered with red ink. And I gave it back to him.
Remember, I’m looking at it rather sadly. And I immediately knew he wasn’t really asking for me to do a massive edit on his paper. What he was asking me to do is look over it and as an English major say, you know, that’s a pretty good paper. And then he’d feel good about it. He wanted to be affirmed. But it’s not as if I was all innocent in this, because I have to say, I really enjoyed marking it up. Was I always perfectly gracious in it? No. I hope I never see his paper again and somehow see everything I put down there. Because I was not being as gracious as I should have been.
And as much as I did genuinely want to help my friend, there were probably things I marked up that didn’t need to be marked up. There were things that weren’t a big deal that I should have just left alone. And so in that moment, it’s a perfect encapsulation of what we do all the time. Because sometimes I’m the person doing the marking and I’m doing it for my own reasons, right? So you can see how good an editor I am, or I want to put that ink out, or I want to feel like I’m a better writer than you. And sometimes I’m the person asking for the paper to be graded. And a lot of times when I’m the person on the other side, not a lot of times, pretty much all the time, I’m a perfect hypocrite here. Because I’m just like him. I don’t want people to pour red ink on it. I want them to say, oh, it looks good, right? And to mean it, of course, but not to find a bunch of things.
And we’re that way with God. We come to Him and say, God, grow me. Help me to be better at the things that you want me to do, to grow in this Christian life. And what we really mean is, God, affirm me in what I am and what I’m thinking and what I’d like to do. And tell me that’s what a Christian should do. And just let me go on my way smoothly and with nothing but blessing vending machines. God, don’t put that red ink.
Now, I can’t replay that moment with my friend and put just the right amount of red ink on it to take several decades of time and be more thoughtful about how I put the red ink on it. But even if I had, he would have known there were times that people did it for self-righteous reasons. Even if my motives had been perfectly pure.
But here’s the thing we can know about God and why it’s so important that we come back to that trust theme over and over. The red ink He puts on your life and on my life, we may not want it. We may feel just like my friend. And boy, there are a lot of times I do. But in God’s case, we don’t have to wonder. I wonder why He put that on there. I wonder if He just wanted to feel important today. I wonder if He just wanted to demonstrate how He could find little bitty flaws.
God is not nitpicking you to find little bitty flaws. He’s growing you to make you the person you were meant to be. And if we trust that, it doesn’t make it easy. The sermon isn’t about telling you, it’s really just here are two or three steps and it’ll be really easy. But rather, it’s to recognize that we can trust that in this, there is pure love from our God. There isn’t love plus self-importance, or love plus revenge, or love plus, I really want to use my pen. It’s just God’s love and His care for us.
Now there are times where we really need all that red ink. In the process of sanctification, the process where God puts His red ink on us, it’s not easy. But clearly in Scripture, what we see over and over again is sanctification is greater than ease. That yes, we can go an easier route where we’re not being disciplined by God and we can miss out on His love. But God’s saying, I don’t want to just save you. I want to give you purpose. I want to send you and prepare you and enable you to do things. I want you, maybe you’re not going to save the whole nation of Egypt like Joseph, but there are things that I have for you that I’m preparing you for. I want to prepare you for them.
And those vaccines, they hurt. Sometimes that’s just a pure redirection, right? God says, I’m going to put this brick wall in front of you so you can’t keep going and we slam into it and it hurts and we need to turn, yes. But just like the garden at the beginning, this sermon isn’t going to solve should we have a garden or not.
It’s hard. God must be disciplining us for wanting to have a garden. We shouldn’t have a garden. It’s not always we need to evaluate. This thing I’m doing right now, it’s gotten hard, so does that mean God doesn’t want me to do it? It could be that God’s preparing me for something further, even the very thing I’m doing, and He’s just preparing me in the process of it too.
Abraham had a lot of flaws, a lot of times where he needed discipline for the very things he was doing at that moment. But one of the places I don’t think that was the case was Genesis 22, where he was called to sacrifice his son Isaac. The hardest thing, surely, he was ever called to do. Now, God, of course, was not going to ultimately have him go through with it, but you wonder what was Abraham thinking? What was that like? How did that work? Wow, that was painful. And at that moment, it seems like Abraham’s cruising along, doing exactly what God wants him to do.
So why then? Well, in the past, Abraham had time and again failed to keep his focus on trusting God. He kept trusting himself, kept turning away. And I think part of the discipline that Abraham needed was he needed to go through a time where he was asked to put everything on the line for the Lord and see that he actually could do it, to reach that point of maturity where he had given for the Lord. So that as he then went into the final stages of his life, doing the mission that God had sent him to do, he had no doubt that he was all in.
And I believe that’s exactly what happened. God didn’t need him to actually kill Isaac. He didn’t want him to kill Isaac. But he needed Abraham to realize that God was absolutely first. That was the place where Abraham needed to grow. And so Abraham, as he was going up the mountain, didn’t need to be thinking, I wonder if last night I wasn’t generous enough with those travelers that went by. I wonder if I didn’t pitch my tent in the most God-honoring way yesterday or the day before. It wasn’t that kind of thing. It was a whole life preparation kind of thing going on.
That might be where you are now, too. I can’t tell you. Sometimes God is just redirecting us in a very straightforward way. But the key thing here isn’t a step-by-step guide to changing our path to growing as Christians, because the secret ingredient isn’t that step-by-step guide, but it’s trusting in the Lord in the process. And that’s what it’s talking about. Abraham had to trust in the Lord. Christians have had to trust in the Lord. And every faithful person, we’re going to be challenged. God is calling us not just to say, well, what things do I need to do? Where’s the checklist of life? But God, I trust you, because that’s where we grow, when we’re trusting in Him.
How do we trust in Him when things do get tough and there is no blessing vending machine? We do so by separating the idea, that very human experiential idea, that discipline is tied in with anger, and see discipline is tied in with perfect love. Every jot, every drop of red ink that God puts in the paper of your life is there because it’s 100% good for you. That’s why it’s there.
When we understand that, it doesn’t make it less painful. I’m not going to tell you it isn’t painful. But in that process of trusting, God grows us because we are proceeding and understanding that discipline is there not for revenge but because the God of the universe loves you.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, I thank you for this evening. Lord, would you help us to soak this in? And Lord, it’s hard. We can’t pretend it isn’t. That’s why you have it here. Why would we despise your discipline? Because it’s painful. Why do we constantly seek after something else? Because we don’t want to go through hard times. It’s not that you’re telling us to seek hard times, you’re telling us to trust you in the good times and the bad times, that what we ultimately do is grow as those who have trust in you. Lord, would you help us to do that tonight? Pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
I hope this has been an encouragement to you. Like I said, if you give us a like or a share, people are going through all kinds of hard times and we all need to know that God loves us in them, that He loves you. If you’ve been thinking that God’s just hateful and angry towards you because of what you’re going through, that’s not true. God loves you. And if you haven’t yet called on Jesus as your Lord and Savior, now’s the perfect time because that’s where it starts. It’s not a promise everything’s going to get easier, but it’s going to be transformative because God’s going to be there as your loving Heavenly Father.
And you can write into our prayer line, 833-356-4032, just send a text, 833-356-4032, or the comments below. And as you do, we can encourage each other. We can pray for each other. Either way, it’s great to hear from you. Also, let me just encourage you, please do join us on Sunday. We’re beginning a brand new series. “He’s got the whole world.” We’re going to Matthew 8. We’ve been slowly working through Matthew on various sermon series over the last few years, and we’re arriving at Matthew 8.
In it, we’re going to see people who see Jesus showing His power, that He does indeed have the world in His hands. And we see them wrestling with it and struggling with it and understanding it to different degrees. The very things that we go through, the questions that we ask, how do we grasp and live in the concept that He has the whole world in His hands?
So I hope you’ll join me and all of us on Sunday night, either in person or online, 5:30 p.m. Central, as we begin that series this Sunday. Great thing to invite someone to for this summer sermon series. I hope to see you there, and please, please, please be praying and inviting in the preparation. Have a wonderful and blessed week, and I’ll see you again very soon.
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